Last Chapter by Ernie Pyle [FIRST EDITION • FIRST PRINTING] 1946

  • $30.00


Last Chapter by Ernie Pyle

FIRST EDITION • FIRST PRINTING [1946] HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

Hardcover with dust jacket in very good condition.

Dust jacket is in very nice shape; original jacket price of $2.50 on front panel.

DJ shows some general wear; a few tiny edge tears and tanned edges; now housed in a new HQ brodart jacket protector.

Book itself is very good.  Clean green embossed boards and a tight binding.  Pages read nicely with tanning. 


The Battle of Okinawa was the very last pitched battle of the Second World War, and it was here, at Ie Shima, that our greatest war correspondent, Ernie Pyle, tragically lost his life.

After covering the war from the British home front to North Africa, Italy, and France, he left the European Theater to go to the Pacific to cover what would be the last few months of conflict with the Japanese forces.  Instead of recounting the discussions and activities of generals or the movements of armies, Pyle captured the daily lives of the common soldier and showed the public how their brothers, fathers and sons were experiencing the war.

Rather than covering the war from safety, he threw himself into the heat of battle so that he could fully understand and record what the fighting men were going through.  Last Chapter is a collection of his last articles that he wrote while witnessing the conflict in the Pacific.

During his time in the Far East he spent time in the occupied Marianas, with pilots and aircrew of B-29’s as they flew in missions over the Japanese mainland, with sailors in the hundreds of boats that were swarming the Pacific Ocean, and with marines as they were preparing for the assault of Okinawa.

Ernie Pyle was the most celebrated war correspondent of World War Two. His work ran in one-hundred and forty-four papers and reached an audience of forty million Americans. His brilliant portrayal of the everyday fighting man in World War Two won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1944. Last Chapter was first published in 1946 after Pyle had been killed at Ie Shima on 18th April, 1945.